Murphy’s law was
news laced with humor
and wisdom
Editor's note: Michael Jerome "Jerry" Murphy was a
Star-Bulletin reporter in the mid-'50s. He spent nearly two
decades as a public relations executive before returning to
newspapers, writing news stories and a column for
community newspapers for 20 years.
Murphy died April 17 at age 74.By Mary Poole
I was still in my 20s when I became Jerry Murphy's editor. In retrospect, that fact strikes me as so absurd that it makes laugh.
At the time, I was a few years out of journalism school while Murphy had nearly four decades experience as a newspaper reporter and public relations executive. He had started his professional career as a teen-ager writing for his hometown newspaper in Waterbury, Conn.
The son of an Irish immigrant, his career also had taken him to the Washington (D.C.) Times-Herald and eventually to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin where he is remembered by veteran staff members as a fine reporter with a well-polished sense of humor.
As a Star-Bulletin writer, he had an important beat covering the expanding military in post-war Hawaii. Later, as Matson Navigation Co.'s public relations director, Jerry put other talents to work representing his high-profile company and using his Irish wit to charm guests aboard the Lurline. He also survived the tricky shoals of city politics handling PR for the Board of Water Supply. In his capacity as the water board spokesman his name often cropped up in Star-Bulletin news stories and he even wrote a periodic column for the paper in 1971.
But his heart was never far from a newsroom and in the late '70s he was back in the reporting business at the Sun Press community newspapers.
Soon he found his work being edited by me, a journalism "infant" by comparison. If that ever bothered him, he didn't let on. Because of his elegant command of a sentence I had the good fortune of rarely having to "fix" his copy and the good sense never to mention it when I did.
The highlight of my work week was having Jerry's column, banged out on an old manual typewriter, appear on my desktop.
What was he writing about this week? The utter uselessness of the penny? His failure to find celery leaves among the cleanly shorn produce in the grocery store? The day his dog ran away and Jerry found himself jailed for refusing to pay a leash law fine? Or was it his view on the one-and-only proper way to butter toast?
My favorite "Murphy's Law" column described his disgust at throwing out an uncooked Thanksgiving turkey after Hurricane Iwa had blown down power lines, disconnecting his electric stove.
Like "Seinfeld" episodes, many of Jerry's columns were about nothing. Yet they were about everything. They chronicled the mundane and untidy experiences that irritate us, make us laugh or cause us worry. They were about the details that fill out our lives and bind us together as fellow human beings.
They were two parts truth and one part blarney. It was the blarney that drew you in and the truth that soothed your soul.
Jerry was a master of polite sarcasm. In the column describing his pain while watching the refuse collectors haul away his thawed and pungent holiday turkey, Jerry referred to the hurricane repeatedly as "Iwa, that frigate bird." We all knew which f-word he was really thinking about.
Jerry always said he wanted to write his own obituary. It's the one column about humanity's shared experiences that he never wrote. If I know Jerry, he probably would have taken a swipe at the funeral business.
Mary Poole is the assistant editor
of the Star-Bulletin editorial pages.
She is also a former Sun Press editor.
